The theme for this year is suicide prevention. The WHO has some scary stats around this topic:
– Every 40 seconds, someone loses their life to suicide
– Suicide is the second leading cause of death for young people, aged 15-29
– 80% of suicides occur in low-middle income countries
Suicide is preventable. And the purpose of 10th October is to help raise awareness of this and reduce the stigma associated with mental health.
The work we’re doing to promote World Mental Health Day, on Thursday 10th October, is no work. So a heads up you should expect a lot of out of office messages 🙂
Unify Communications are hosting a dedicated Future of Retail CX workshop, covering the dangers of customer service silos, how to invest in self-service for call deflection, and ways retailers can ensure they keep pace with the increasingly demanding omnichannel customer.
The day will see discussions around engaging your workforce, embracing AI and improving communication across all channels.
I’ll be sharing some killer hacks to make your service conversations great.
When: Thursday 27th June 2019, 12:00 – 16:30
Where: Home Sweet Home, Covent Garden, London
The event is free to attend. Click here to register.
American author Gretchen Rubin said: “What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.” Training, workshops and guides are those once in a while interventions that are a good starting point for advisors’ communication soft skills development. And, may give a short-term boost for business outcomes like customer satisfaction, sales or cost reduction.
But, what can be done every day to keep it front of mind and make sure that improvements are sustained?
We work with many clients on improving the scorecards used to assess advisor interactions — whether these be calls, emails, webchats or social media responses. Scorecards are also often the centre of that everyday all-important coaching, as well as Quality Assurance (QA) measurement and improvement efforts.
Creating scorecards to measure compliance is relatively simple — for example a yes / no for whether advisors let customers know that calls may be recorded. When it comes to assessing soft skills things may seem trickier.
Worryingly, scoring soft skills sometimes becomes a tick box exercise that can drive the wrong behaviours. When we speak to advisors, as part of our QA discovery, sometimes they’ll say they do something just to get a “tick in the QA box”. Although no harm is done if a sales promotion is hurriedly copy – pasted at the end of a webchat session to meet a “sales through service” requirement. Asking an angry caller “how are you today” because it’s required to meet the “rapport” criteria isn’t going to help an advisor, the customer or your satisfaction scores.
Soft skills that mean advisors are able to take opportunities to improve sales, reduce repeat contact to cut costs and build rapport to increase customer satisfaction may be shades of grey in what can be a very black and white world.
As such, it can be tempting to remove soft skills from scorecards altogether. However, with studies showing how important something as simple as advisor tone of voice is for customer satisfaction, for example, you’d be missing an opportunity to produce some very real business benefits.
With this in mind, here are our top 10 tips for scorecards that’ll improve advisor communication soft skills and deliver business results:
1. Develop and test your scoring criteria — be willing to try different criteria to find what works best for advisors, team leaders and your business goals. To help those scoring, and receiving feedback, criteria that have a good Inter-Rater Reliability are best. It’s also vital to confirm that criteria are driving business outcomes you want.
2. Don’t over engineer it — Just having scorecards, that are used regularly, will keep soft skills at the front of advisors’ minds and drive improvements.
3. Be specific — it’s useful to divide scorecards down into broad categories, e.g. Rapport. And, also give specific guidance — e.g. having a tone that is warm, clear and interested — so that everyone knows what helps to build rapport.
4. Support your scorers — run calibration workshops so that those doing the scoring can see how they compare and discuss, as well as feedback, problems.
5. Lead by example — scored reference interactions help scorers and advisors to know what ‘good’ looks and sounds like.
6. Accept some scoring variability — choosing criteria with good Inter Rater Reliability, providing examples and running calibration workshops all help to reduce scoring inconsistency. But, QA results from softs skills assessments just aren’t as black and white as those from compliance for example. As long as your scorecard is driving the business outcomes you want (point 2) it’s doing its job.
7. Think ahead to coaching — scorecards help team leaders and coaches find skills gaps. Work with them to create skill development activities that are aligned to criteria to make coaching and skills development more effective.
8. Don’t forget about reward — praise for what advisors have done well is just as important as advice on how to improve.
9. Have a joined-up approach — use categories and criteria that work with other parts of your improvement programme such as training, workshops and internal communications etc.
10. Make it easy to use — design scorecards and feedback (colours, layout and graphics) that are quick and simple for advisors to understand. Why does a scorecard have to be a spreadsheet, or be called a scorecard for that matter?
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you develop a better scorecard, drop us a line.
“We’ve been able to make simple changes – within our existing systems and technology – which have had an immediate and positive impact, in reducing contact.” Customer Service Director.
Results
We’ve achieved some amazing results from our work with our Water Company client!
30% reduction in unwanted contact
60% reduction in calls from billing letters
Supported a big jump in Ofwat league table
Internal admin time reduced, by streamlining operational and billing templates
Challenge
Improve customer experiences across voice, digital, SMS, written and printed communication and channels, reducing frustrating, ‘unwanted’ contact, where possible.
Solution: Service Communications Programme
Improving service performance through consumer insights and ‘joining up’ inbound and outbound contact across Billing, Customer Service, Network Operations, Water Testing and Metering:
Consumer research and insights – getting customer feedback on bills
Creating and embedding a new tone of voice, to drive the right behaviours
Templates and guidelines for bills, calls, emails, letters, webchat and printed comms
Streamlining the IVR to improve call steering and self-service
Communication training workshops, for call centre and field teams
Improving outbound SMS effectiveness, with easy-to-use, template messages and URLs
Redesigning printed leaflets and
Digital, web service content – including FAQs and emergency alerts
Our consumer research
To understand how bills impact customer behaviour and contact. These are some of the things that customers, we surveyed, told us:
41% of customers asked, said they had contacted/considered contacting their water company, because they couldn’t understand their bill
80% of these customers said they were happy with online-only bills
25% said their bills weren’t useful
Based on these customer insights, and with a better understanding of contact drivers, our key goals were to:
Make bills and related comms, clearer and easier to understand (to reduce contact)
Improve online help and best ways to contact
Look at where the bill featured in overall contact and the customer’s journey
Look at self-service options, with focus on home movers (the current SIM survey estimates this is the reason for 11% of calls)
Better promotion of Direct Debit – in a way that’s more benefit-lead for customers
Unwanted contact is as frustrating for customers, as it is for companies – it continues to be a problem for most of our clients, within utilities and across many other sectors. If you’d like to know how we can reduce frustrating contact for you (while also improving customer satisfaction), drop us a line
If you had to choose what was the most significant change in the written word over the last 20 years then the use of smileys, emoticons and emojis might well be it. Although the use of pictograms in writing dates back hundreds of years, it’s within this digital age of webchat, texts, email and social media that they’ve really taken off.
Instagram recently said that 50% of posts on their social media platform used emojis. Based on a UK study researchers at Bangor University also say that they’re the fastest growing language in history. This upsurge is put down to the fact that they can easily be understood in all cultures, allow writers to express more complex emotions clearly and are free to spread – at the speed of light – across a population that’s now continually connected by the internet.
As they’ve become such a regular part of our personal lives you might expect that we want to see smileys, emoticons and emojis in service communications too. However when we recently ran a study looking at webchat it showed customers weren’t quite as happy about businesses using smileys and emoticons as you might think. When we also saw this poll by YouGov – saying that consumers thought businesses are trying too hard with emojis – we thought it was worth finding out what people really think about emoticons and smileys being used in written service communications of all types.
The results below are what we found for emails, social media and letters. If you’d like to know what customers said when it comes to texts and webchat – drop us a line:
Emoticons are least wanted in the older written service channels
Perhaps not surprisingly letters were where customers least wanted to see a smiley or emoticon and Social Media was where they were wanted most. What also stands out is that including them in email wasn’t well liked with only 18% of consumers saying they wanted or preferred seeing them whilst 39% said they didn’t want them or preferred they weren’t used.
Younger age groups are more likely to prefer them, but not in emails
Across nearly every form of written service communication younger generations preferred emoticons more, with objection growing steadily with age. The one exception was email where 24% of the 18-24 group said they want / prefer them compared to 28% of the 25-35 age group. The view of the 18-24 age group to them being used in email was approaching that of them being used in letters. It may mean that this age group view emails in a similar way to letters – as something that requires a greater degree of formality. Smileys are most at home in the South East
When it came to attitudes to emoticons within different regions there wasn’t a huge difference. But Wales / South West (46%) and Scotland (44%) was where they were least wanted and the South East had least objection (39%). Gender isn’t a divide (for once)
In most of the studies we’ve completed previously there have been some differences in how women and men react. However, as far as emoticons and smileys go, there was no significant difference in opinion when it comes to letters, emails and social media.
Because smileys, emoticons and emojis have become such a regular part of our personal lives you might expect that we’d be happy to see them in service communications as well. But – as our study shows – as customers we’re much less keen overall.
Research notes The consumer research was conducted for us by ICM. They interviewed a random sample of 2,001 GB adults aged 18+ online between 2nd – 4th December 2016. Surveys were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. The worst case margin of error is ± 2.2% at a 95% confidence level. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules you can find further information at www.icmresearch.com
This year we were lucky enough to be invited to the LIAR IV politeness / impoliteness linguistics conference in Manchester. At the conference, we presented our latest study on what customers think about service email greetings.
Here’s what we think you should bear in mind when choosing your greeting. If you want more information on why, we’ve summarised what we covered at the conference below the tips.
1. Take your cues from how your customer says hello — nothing will tell you more about how someone likes to be greeted than how they write to you. That doesn’t necessarily mean copying their greeting. Just bear in mind how formal or informal (e.g. Dear vs Hi) and personal or impersonal (e.g. first name vs no name) it is.
2. Think about your sector, and why customers are in touch — our most recent study showed that they shape customer expectations of how formal greetings will be. Complaints to banks was where most formality was expected. Product information from retailers was where customers anticipated least.
3. What does your brand say? — consider how your company wants to relate to customers. Perhaps you’re the kind of brand that breaks expectations and surprises people (in a good way). For example, Banking may be where the majority of customers anticipate formality. But customers of Virgin (a brand that’s well known for it’s straight talking friendly service) might want less formality — and some customers might be a bit disappointed if Virgin were to write like others.
4. Get customers’ names right — although choosing the right greeting is important, it’s not the only thing you should be thinking about. In our survey, spelling a customer’s name wrong firmly came top of what was thought of as inappropriate. See below for what customers said they’d do if you get it wrong.
5. Hello, I’m a robot — as well as how your advisors say hi, think about how automatic responses sound too. Confirming that an email’s landed in your inbox, or how long it’ll take you to reply, may not require a greeting at all. If you decide to leave it off, it has to be clear that there isn’t a person behind the email though. And it’s a good idea to make any follow-up email from your team feel that bit more personal.
Hello science, goodbye guesswork?
Question: How formal do you find these greetings? (Greetings ranked by mean average scores.)
We asked people to score some commonly used greetings according to how formal they find them. No big surprises when we averaged the formality scores: ‘To whom it may concern’ came out most formal (along with ‘Dear Mr Smith’). And a simple ‘Hi’ was most informal.
But take a closer look below — and you’ll see the averages hide a wide spread of opinion. One man’s ‘Dear Paul’ is another’s ‘Hi Paul’.
In our previous greetings blog, we noted that 70% of people thought that they weren’t greeted appropriately at times. The difference of opinion on formality might be one of the things that’s causing this. Because if we all agreed what’s the most polite, we’d all be getting it right more often.
Question: How formal do you find these greetings? (Percentage of consumers choosing each factor for every greeting.)
Sector and reason for contact shape customers’ expectations
Question: How formal do you think greetings should be? (Sectors and reasons for contact ranked by mean averages.)When we asked about the formality of email hellos for different sectors, consumers said banks / building societies should be most formal and retailers the least. When it came to reasons for contact, complaints came top for formality, with product info at the bottom.One well-known politeness theory by academics Brown and Levinson says that how we choose to communicate is based on the ‘weightiness’ of the interaction — the ‘social distance’ between participants, their relative ‘power’ and the ‘imposition’ of a request. Our results show that when ‘serious’ matters are being discussed, more formality is expected (e.g. customers expected greetings from banks in complaint responses to be most formal). Whether seriousness is the same thing as weightiness still has us wondering. Brown and Levinson also say that formality is just one way to be polite — some companies may choose camaraderie while others may prefer deference.
Greetings are important, as are names
Question: What’s most inappropriate? (Percentage of consumers rating a factor first)
We thought it’d be interesting to see how important greetings are when compared to another well-known (and related) customer gripe — getting their name right.57% said they thought it was the most inappropriate of the options, beating ‘no greeting’ by some margin. Making sure that customer details are correct lays the foundation for a great greeting.
The cost of getting it wrong
If a greeting is inappropriate, which of these are you most likely to do? (Customers could choose multiple outcomes. Percentage of consumers choosing an outcome.)
What do customers do if a greeting is inappropriate? The good news: you probably won’t lose a customer just because they didn’t like the greeting. Leaving, telling an organisation and becoming a vocal detractor were at the bottom of the list.
The bad news: ‘Trust the email less’ (54%) came top, followed by ‘Nothing’ (44%) and ‘Trust the company less’ (41%). Greetings set the tone of the interaction, and they can undermine the credibility of your message before you’ve even properly started — making customers more likely to call, write back, or doubt you.
Last updated 27th July 2016
Research notes Adults aged 18+ in GB interviewed online via Survey Monkey between 7 – 10 April 2016. Surveys were conducted across the country. Margin of error: ± 4.6% at a 95% confidence level assuming the worst case (50% of consumers selecting a factor).
When a story about how to apologise hit the news headlines recently, we thought it was time for us to have a look again at the hardest word. We reviewed the original research (that sparked the story) published in the journal of Negotiations and Conflict Management Research. And looked at current service best practices from the public as well as private sectors. Then we asked our team for their psychological, linguistic, voice, legal and service views.
The list below is what we think you should consider when you apologise. If you want to see and hear them applied to some real life examples, take a look at our spoken and written complaints workshops.
1. How and who — think about how much harm was done and the needs of the customer. Then consider how you should apologise: in writing, over the phone or face-to-face. And who should say it: an advisor, team leader, manager or your Chief Executive.
2. Say sorry — just the word may be powerful enough — customers want to know that you care enough to say it. For example: “I’m really sorry that your delivery didn’t arrive when we said it would.”
3. Admit that it went wrong — provide a short summary of what the problem was and say clearly that this was wrong. It’s important that you’re specific to show you understand exactly what has caused any dissatisfaction. You should also acknowledge any knock-on effects of the problem that the customer mentioned. For example: “Your delivery definitely should have arrived the next day. I can see from your email it was very frustrating that you set aside time to receive something that didn’t turn up — especially as you paid extra for next day delivery.”
4. Accept responsibility — for the problem and any harm done.
5. Provide an explanation — say why went things went wrong and that this was not intentional or personal. For example: “Your delivery was part of a consignment that was held up because of exceptionally heavy snow overnight.” If there’s no valid explanation, you could simply say that there’s no excuse for the problem, or that you’ll look into what went wrong.
6. Say why things will be different in future — this may include letting customers know what steps you’re taking to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again. Sometimes customers are just unlucky — our snow-delayed delivery for instance. Here consider explaining that you do keep track of things so that customers feel reassured you have everything under control. And that next time things will be better. For example: “I know this won’t come as much comfort but this happens rarely and 99.8% of our parcels do arrive on time. Your next delivery will get to you next day.” This part of your apology is very important if you want customers to stay and recommend you to others.
7. Make amends — no doubt you’ll have your own rules about what can be offered: compensation, replacement and good will gestures etc. What’s important from a communication point of view is that you clearly state what you’re offering and when the customer can expect to receive this.
8. Say thank you — In a financial services study this year 17% of customers said they would not complain because they feared being penalised. Show that you value the time and effort customers put into their complaint. They’ll also feel reassured that it won’t be held against them. For instance: “Thanks again for getting in touch. We want our service to be spot on every time. But, when things don’t go to plan, your comments give us a valuable opportunity to make amends and stop the same thing happening again.”
9. Be sincere — for your apology to be effective, customers need to believe you mean what you say. Coming across as sincere is as much about the tone you use as the words. And, if you’re face-to-face, body language is vital too.
In the new research we reviewed, ‘acknowledging you were wrong’ and ‘offering to fix the problem’ were the parts of the apology that were most effective. Although the more elements (from 3–7 in our list) that were included, the more effective the apology became.
One final point. We often get asked whether saying sorry makes an organisation liable. In reply our legal beagle points to The Compensation Act of 2006: “An apology, an offer of treatment or other redress, shall not of itself amount to an admission of negligence or breach of statutory duty.” And he says that the question of liability is decided by whether there is a duty which has been breached and caused any detriment.
One of the questions we get asked often is what greeting should be used when speaking and writing to customers.
Although we all seem sensitive to what greetings should be used (whether we’re greeting or being greeted) the rules for choosing them seem unclear at best. What used to be thought of as appropriate, for example a traditional ‘Dear Sir’, might now come across as too stuffy when showing warmth and being down to earth is what’s required by many brands. Equally a simple ‘Hi’ might be ok when answering a question, but for some sectors and reasons for contact (for example banking and answering a complaint) a little less familiarity might be needed.
Why are greetings a particularly sensitive issue? It may be because of the primacy effect (what we hear first we tend to remember) and politeness theoristssee it as the beginning of the negotiation of the all-important current ‘relationship’ we have with the person we’re writing or talking too.
In this blog, the first of two on the subject, we’ve looked at where customers find greetings inappropriate (i.e. which service channels). We’ve also delved into the data about email service to find out what bearing demographic factors have, such as age and gender.
As previously, the research was carried out for us by well-known market researchers ICM with a representative sample of 2000 people in the UK.
In the next blog we’ll look at what greetings are preferred, what happens if you use something that’s inappropriate and give you our tips for the perfect greeting.
The phone and email are where consumers most often feel that they’re greeted inappropriately
From our survey it’s clear that the phone (77%) is where customers most often feel that they’re greeted inappropriately. This isn’t an occasional thing either, with 44% saying that it happens either Every, Most or Around half the time. That’s a sobering thought.
email, Face-to-face and text were next on the list with 70% to 68% saying they’ve been greeted in a way that they didn’t find fitting.
Interestingly it was the newer channels — social media and web chat (in particular) — that faired the best. One school of thought was that customers would be less likely to find greetings improper for the older channels (phone, email and face-to-face) as the precedents for these have been around longer. But, this was not supported by our study.
Millennials are the least likely to have a problem with email greetings
It probably comes as no great surprise that the youngest age group, 18 – 24 year olds, was least likely to have a problem with email greetings (62%). But, despite the popular notion that older generations are more sensitive about how salutations are used, the two eldest age groups, 65 – 74 (70%) and 75+ (68%), were not those that topped the list. That honour was reserved for the 25 – 34, 35 – 44 and 55 – 64 groups ranging from 75% to 76%. When it comes to email, men are more likely to feel that greetings are unsuitable
The last thing we looked at for the email channel was the gender divide. Men (74%) were significantly more likely to find a hello inapt than women (66%). Men were also far more likely to report that they were greeted inappropriately Every or Most times (22%).Men seem to find greetings inappropriate more often than women across all channels in our study. You remember that famous scene in Jerry Maguire, where Dorothy says to Jerry “You had me at hello”? Perhaps if Dorothy had been saying hello, things would’ve turned out differently.
Research notes ICM interviewed a random sample of 2,000 adults aged 18+ in GB, online between 18 – 22 March 2016. Surveys were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules. Further information at www.icmresearch.com.
Last month we wrote about 10 Things Every Service Writer Should Know. In that blog we listed some of the best practices that make up our 4 Service Writing Rules — Credibility, Clarity, Answer and Tone (C-CAT).
This month we asked well known market researcher ICM to find out what would happen when we applied those rules to a customer service email response about a new car insurance enquiry. This is what they found:
If you’re interested in how we improved the email response, our 4 Service Writing Rules and what you can do to develop the skills of your writing team, take a look at our Writing to Improve Service — 1 Day Course.
If you’d like to find out more about how we did the research and the results, give us a call or drop us an email.
